lil-miss-choc:

phreekedelic:

I’m getting sick of the term friendzone.

Me too. And, more than that, I’m sick of the people using it.

Women are told almost constantly—by the media, the government, and the overall attitude of society—that our bodies don’t fucking belong to us. The mythical friendzone is just another way for misogynists to enforce that idea while getting to play the victim.

It sucks when someone you have feelings for doesn’t share those feelings; it happens to women all the time, too. We hear “I just want to be friends” and “you’re like one of the guys” and “you’re like a sister to me” just as often. But you’ll never hear a woman complain that guys just don’t appreciate a Nice Girl because we’re taught it’s our own fucking fault when we’re rejected—we aren’t pretty enough or thin enough or sexy enough, we weren’t sexual enough or were too sexual, we put out too much or too little or too soon or not soon enough, we didn’t wear our hair the right way or our skirt the right length, we’re “too tomboyish” or “too butch” or “too feminine”, or we’re “not their type”, or we’re otherwise not good enough in various ways to entice the man to grace us with his affection.

But when we’re not interested in someone, we’re vilified. We’re the bitch that lead them on, the bitch who let them buy us dinner but didn’t want to date them, the bitch who doesn’t appreciate a nice guy, the bitch they were nice to and then got nothing in return from.

And, frankly, fuck those people. Showing interest in me, being friendly with me, getting close to me, or eating a meal with me (even if they paid for it) doesn’t obligate me to open my heart or my legs. And anyone who doesn’t appreciate my friendship sure as hell doesn’t deserve my love or my pussy.

-message broadcast from atop my throne of fences-

It’s just really difficult to keep everyone happy. I feel like sometimes ‘friendzoning’ is a thing, because some guys are either shy or just not very direct, and don’t make it clear that they’d like to be involved with a girl, because they’d like to scope things out, and make sure that they would like to ask them out first. The norm, however, seems largely to be to get to know someone a little, then decide that from that point you’d like to get to know someone more intimately in a definite ‘dating’ context, so it can be the case that these guys stop being considered by the girl as potential relationship material because they’re not being direct, and therefore they can get pissed off and consider that they got friendzoned. This is people who have been spurned being bitchy because they can’t accept that someone wouldn’t want to date them and passing the blame onto the other party. And, call me out on this if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly sure that girls tell one another that a guy who dumps them just doesn’t appreciate her enough. There are guys who are just interested in getting girls to put out. They are not Nice Guys. They don’t appreciate getting into an intimate relationship with someone who actually has a personality because all they think about is sex. These people are very unlikely to complain about being friendzoned, and are much more likely to call you a prude and then fuck off to shag someone with lower standards.

I’m not saying that friendzoning is the same as going on a date with someone and then deciding you don’t like them. That’s a completely different matter, and is completely reasonable: you were in a context where it was assumed to be understood that intimacy was possible, but you decided that wasn’t what you wanted. That’s what dating is about, and if you complain about being friendzoned after that then you don’t really get it.

Also, bitching about being friendzoned doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate the friendship, it’s more likely to indicate that you value the friendship to the extent that you would have loved for it to be more than that. If friendship is all you want, it’s great, but if you were aiming for a relationship it can seem like second-best.

However it is definitely the case that it happens the other way around, and I know people it’s happened to. It’s a two-sided problem, and girls are entitled to bitch about it just as much as guys do.

Basically sometimes there are misunderstandings and also some people are assholes. Don’t just suddenly hate on someone if they feel like they got friendzoned, but don’t go around saying you got friendzoned when someone you were on a date with refused to have sex with you.

-adds another fence to the throne and surveys the horde of approaching haters-

Very well said! There’s nothing misogynistic about the word ‘friendzone’ - the OP is reading far too much into what is, in all honestly, a harmless descriptor of the state of a relationship between two people.

I’ve used it myself, in both directions:

“I wish he’d either friendzone me or ask me out. I’m sick of him half leading me on all the time - I just want to know where we stand.”

and also

“I need to make sure this guy knows he is definitely friendzoned. I don’t to lead him on.”

She seems to be a bit deluded that all men are absolute cocks who want nothing more than to have sex with every girl they see and verbally abuse those who reject them.

Saying that a girl ‘friendzoned’ you is not vilifying her - it is simply a statement that she has only platonic interest in you.

I dunno, though - I’ve definitely seen it where there’s a whining element to ‘She friendzoned me’, with an undertone of ‘what an ungrateful bitch’. In the best tradition of Nice Guys (tm) they push the blame onto the girl for the heinous crime of…not being interested in them. I understand that isn’t always the implication, as in the examples you mentioned, but I see the former way too much for my liking.